Given the widespread availability and usage of social networks by consumers, many businesses have become interested in being able to effectively market their products through various social networking mediums.
It would be very useful to provide an effective mechanism to allow businesses and enterprise business applications to interact with and take action upon data that originate from online sources of social data and commentary. For example, consider a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) application, which is designed to facilitate the ability of a business to create, develop, and build relationships with its customers or potential customers. It would be very desirable to allow the business CRM application to stay informed of actionable social networking content, for example, to identify potential customers and possible sales leads.
As another example, brand managers are often interested in monitoring commentary on the internet regarding their brands or competitors' brands. Brand managers may read the commentary to gauge interest in their marketing materials, receive feedback regarding their products, or take further action regarding any inflammatory postings.
It would also be useful to provide effective approaches to be able to construct effective marketing campaigns based upon data from analysis of social media sources, and to also utilize those same social media venues as part of the marketing campaign.
Embodiments of the present invention provide a system, method, and computer program product for implementing an integrated solution for real-time social marketing. The approach allows a business entity to access and integrate with social media data, where data is accessed from across multiple types of internet-based sources of social data and commentary and to perform semantic analysis upon that data. The results of that analysis are used to take actions to construct and implement a social media marketing campaign. In some embodiments, the integrated system may be cloud-based, and include both a social monitor/analysis service as well as a social marketing/CRM application.
Other additional objects, features, and advantages of the invention are described in the detailed description, figures, and claims.